Before I start, I would just like to say that I’ll talk a little bit about trans rights later on so if that is something that affects you personally and you don’t want to read about it today please do not do that. Much love to you.

Not me writing about mental health again. Don’t I have anything else to say? No, I do not. There won’t be any details about horrific medication induced nightmares in this post though, if you want to read about those you can go back to my Living With Depression posts – possibly the world’s most cheerful trilogy. No, today I wanted to write a little bit about Mental Health Awareness week. Mental health! Are you aware?

I don’t want to suggest there is no value in awareness campaigns, of course there is. The more awareness and acceptance there is for people with mental ill health, the better. Talking about our struggles is important and I wrote three posts about what it’s like to live with depression, so if I were to say the conversation around it is of no value that would sound very very silly. But when I log in to Instagram and Twitter and see all these infographics and posters espousing the vital importance of mental health awareness, I find myself thinking ‘yeah, and what?’

It’s all well and good trying to make everyone aware of what mental illness is and what it looks (or doesn’t look) like and how you might be able to help somebody you love who is suffering, but awareness alone will not go nearly far enough to actually address the problem and make real, life-changing improvements. It is an important aspect, sure, but at the moment it can feel like it is the only thing actually happening. If we are truly serious about tackling the mental health crisis – which affects predominantly young people (75% of mental health problems are established by the age of 24)– we have to start making concrete improvements to the world we are currently living in and start building towards a future that doesn’t seem quite so unbearably bleak.

We cannot expect the mental health of young people to get any better if we are still rapidly approaching climate catastrophe. Nor can we expect it to improve if the prospect of owning our own homes keeps getting further out of reach. Nor will it improve if our government consistently shows utter disdain for the young, the poor, or basically anybody who isn’t a conservative party member. Or if the media landscape continues to be hostile towards minority communities (I am thinking specifically of trans people here, with this being a particularly nasty and prevalent ‘discussion’ at the moment).

How can we expect people to think positively about the future when we are just about reaching the point where our planet is irretrievably fucked and is on its way to inhabitability? Perhaps things won’t completely break down in our lifetime – we might be going on coastal holidays to Crawley because our favourite seaside town (obviously Brighton) has been engulfed by the sea but hey, at least we won’t have to travel as far and temperatures will be positively tropical in October half term. But what about our potential children who will be spending their half terms on Crawley Beach? Do we really want to bring another generation into a world that, at best, will be an awful place to live because of the effects of climate change?

And what about the quality of life we can expect now and in the future? There are currently two million people in this country having to skip meals because they can’t afford to feed themselves and our government seems to think that is absolutely fine, and clearly so do a lot of the population. The lives of people in poverty are subject to thousands of tweets and columns about how, actually, it is easy to feed a family for 20 pounds per week, all you have to do is buy a bag of mince and some potatoes and chew on them raw every day of the week and you will enjoy it you ungrateful scab! Perhaps you should have worked harder so your parents could send you to a nice school and then you’d have a job writing for the Daily Mail, even though you have no talent for writing and your opinions are essentially one step away from ‘just let the poors die!’ And don’t you dare have a television because god forbid you have any enjoyment in your life, sell that thing and get more potatoes! Just this week there was a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate the opening of a food bank. Celebrating! The opening of a food bank! The need for food banks should be shameful. The government is so unable (or unwilling) to take care of the basic needs of the population so we have to rely on donations to food banks so people can feed themselves. This is not something that should be celebrated, it is something we should look upon as a damming indictment of a government that is failing in its most basic duties and we should be fucking angry about it.

And what about the mental health of minorities in this country? The government recently excluded trans people from a ban on conversion therapy and said that trans people could be excluded from single sex services for ‘justifiable and proportionate’ reasons. It seems to me rather obvious that the mental health of a group of people would suffer when they are being denied the same human rights afforded to other people. The media attitude towards trans people, particularly in this country, can be very hostile and there is a lot of hateful, damaging language used. I imagine most of you know who the most high profile culprit of this is, and I would just like to say that her books are very bad and the recent film spin offs are even worse and she is really terrible! When we look back in a few years and reflect on how trans rights are being discussed now I imagine we will be ashamed, and we need to be the people who affect change now.

So yes, let’s make sure everyone is aware of different mental illnesses and let’s break down the stigma and barriers to talking about our struggles, but let’s also start addressing real world issues that are root causes of why a lot of people are suffering in the first place. Talking can be an effective tool to lift people up, but it is absolutely vital that we improve the material circumstances which lead to so many people suffering with whatever mental illnesses they have.

I’ve written two posts about my experience with depression so far, so I thought it would be rude not to make it a trilogy. And now seems like a good time to do it, I came off my medication a couple of months ago and got a job a couple of weeks after that, and generally I feel as close to pre-depression me as ever – albeit a bit older and a bit heavier. I’m sure some people saw me share this post and thought oh no, Liam’s writing about his depression again, I can’t believe he’s still exploiting that for his blog. To those people I say hell yes I am! The past two depression posts have got great numbers for me, and if there’s something I love it’s getting great numbers on my blogs. But also I have had to live with this for four years, and the least I can do is exploit it for views. It’s also good to talk openly about our mental health, it might just help someone down the line, and that would be a good thing.

So what has happened since my last depression related post? Well, actually, before I wrote that, I broke up with my girlfriend – or rather she broke up with me. This seems like a weird place to start when we’re talking about the improvement in my mental health but I think the consequences of that, apart from the bit of heartbreak, have been really positive. It meant that I left Guernsey to move back to the UK, which felt like a fresh start for me and gave me something to look forward to.

And then I moved back and was on universal credit for about a year. This was less than ideal, the money you get from that is… not very much, and I still struggled with my finances, mainly because my impulse control was non-existent. It was easy to think when I had a bad day that buying something would make me feel better, and it might do in the moment, but when I came to check my bank balance the feeling was much worse than it would have been had I not bought a completely pointless takeaway or whatever else I felt would be a good mood booster. I eventually realised I couldn’t keep haemorrhaging money as I was, so I started to budget, cancelled some subscriptions and, luckily, started feeling better in myself, finding it easier to control my impulses.

While I was having no luck finding a job it was recommended to me by various people to do some volunteering somewhere, to boost my CV but also to get out of the house a bit and get back into any kind of work, to see how I would feel mentally. I wasn’t sure about volunteering at first. I held some bitterness about the difficulty I was having trying to find a job. I applied for quite a lot and never even got an interview. It seemed to me like I was being ignored because of my mental health issues and that made me resent the idea of giving my time up for free – did people only want me if I wouldn’t even demand payment for my labour? One suggestion that sounded like something I could do though was to volunteer at Citizens Advice, so I applied for that at the end of May this year. I went for an interview and was offered a role there. I was really happy, I had been turned away from so many places and to get a yes was such a huge relief. I was in a group of about five people who all started at the same time. We went for a few training days and then I was assigned to help out on the web chat service. For the first time in a long time I felt like I was doing something worthwhile and I felt proud of myself. I had filled in the application, gone to the interview and got the job. Maybe I could do it. Working seemed like a real possibility for the first time in a few years.

I applied for my job at Morrisons in October, I still hadn’t really got an interview anywhere else so I didn’t hold out much hope, but it didn’t take long for the email to come through inviting me to an interview. I would finally have to bring out the suit I bought about ten months ago. Again I was offered the job at my interview, so obviously I make a fantastic impression in person. I was so pleased to have finally been offered money in exchange for my work after a year of searching. I have been at Morrisons for about six weeks now and I feel like having this job has been a real boost for me. Work was one of the main factors that led to me having depression, and for a while there I felt like I would never be able to work again. But I do now and, as I said, it has had a massive positive impact on my mental health. Having the routine of work is great, my sleep pattern has been consistent since I started, and, with the job being active, I get exercise every day, either through work or going to the gym – something else I have more motivation for since starting my job.

I stopped taking my tablets a couple of months ago. I was starting to feel stable and the side-effects were less than ideal things to deal with long term. One of the medications I was on massively increased my appetite, leading me to put on a lot of weight in the couple of years I took them. The other tablet had some… unfortunate sexual side-effects. Probably something you don’t want to read about but, if you’re curious, the medication is called sertraline. If you’re not interested, that is something that will stay between me and my many – by which I mean not many at all – sexual partners. Since I started work though I’ve managed to lose a stone of weight through the combination of my active job, going to the gym more regularly, and eating much better. I’ve been trying a predominantly vegan diet too, which has definitely helped me to lose weight and increase my energy levels. I would recommend anyone considering it to give it a go.

So to sum up, although it has been about four years since I had a breakdown in my bedroom in Guernsey and couldn’t get out of bed, I finally feel like myself again. Of course, I’m not the same person I was back then. There are aspects of the depression that I think I will live with for the rest of my life. I’m not quite as laissez-faire as I was back then (although I am still very laid back). I’m not quite as boisterous as I was – I haven’t sung in front of anyone for a long time. And I will always have days where I feel a bit down – take election day this year for example. But I have a lot of what makes me me back. I dance around the kitchen goofily when I’m cooking and listening to music. I’m a sarcastic prick. I’m bloody hilarious. I take care of my appearance. I wear great clothes. I am myself, and I like who I am. That is how I know I’m back to my best. Even if my best is a little different to what it was.

 

You can find my other Living with Depression posts under the Mental Health tab.

It’s been more than a year since I wrote a piece about my experience of life with depression and, to be honest, it painted a fairly bleak picture of existence but, to be honest again, at that time my existence was pretty bleak. Since then the world has moved on and so have I. My circumstances have changed, not completely, but quite considerably. And I feel like I’m finally on the up.

One reason for this is probably my medication. I’ve been on a stable dosage for well over a year and I have been more or less stable in that time. Mental health medication usually subdues your emotions so the benefit is fewer serious downturns in mood – I don’t really have periods longer than a couple of days in what I would call ‘proper’ depression. Of course, the flip side to this is that I don’t really experience many big highs, so I tend to be on a fairly consistent level, not really depressed but not really happy at the same. In the context of my past few years, that is excellent progress. I think being in a stable place emotionally means that I can take new challenges and difficult events in stride more easily.

I’ve also been in therapy with somebody who has really helped me to consider my depression in what feels to me like a rational way. And it isn’t just about thinking of depression more rationally, but thinking of life in general more rationally too. Lots of people would probably tell you that, before the onset of my depression, I was a pretty laid back kind of a guy and that the ever changing nature of our crazy world, and the challenges we’re all presented with from all kinds of different angles, were unlikely to faze me. This attitude was taken away from me by depression and anxiety. For probably 18 months the things that I previously took for granted could seem like insurmountable challenges. Walking to the shop, going to play football, even starting conversations with friends and family were, in my mind, huge events. In itself, that presents obvious difficulties in day to day existence. For me it didn’t just provoke these ‘surface level’ challenges, but also more deeply rooted ones. This, I now think, is why it has taken such a long time for me to really feel like I’m becoming myself again. Being somebody you don’t really identify as you constitutes a real existential crisis – as cliched as that feels to say. And for a long time I didn’t realise this was what was happening to me. Not only was almost anything incredibly difficult to even think about (never mind do) but it was such a massive change in the core of my personality that I couldn’t, in any meaningful way, understand what was happening to me.

Through therapy I have become much more clear minded about what the challenges I face are, and how my depression had really taken my knowledge of my self away from me. Now I can think about myself as something other than depression. I’m a man with ambitions again. I have passion for the things I had passion for three years ago. I hate Donald Trump, I hate Brexit and I hate Sheffield United. I love playing football, I love comedy, language, writing. I can identify things that matter deeply to me and, perhaps even more importantly, I can take a step back and understand the things that don’t matter and the things I can’t control and I understand that is ok.

The past happened, my depression happened and is still happening, although to a lesser extent recently, and it is something I will always remember, but that doesn’t mean I should dwell on it. Recently I have made a conscious effort to look forward to what might be to come. To carry the weight of my past mental illness into the future is a waste of energy that could instead be focused on something else. Dwelling on the past gives you less time to think about the present and the future – and that’s where the real fun is. From therapy I have learned to accept that I can’t be in control of everything – I can’t stop Donald Trump being a turmeric covered international incident waiting to happen and I can’t change other people’s decisions and opinions (although I like to think I’m very influential) and that is ok. If you can’t control events and outcomes why spend time wondering about whether you could, or how you could. I have also learnt through my therapy another obvious yet somewhat elusive truth – the past is gone.

Of course, it is good to look back, to learn lessons and to smile about good times but the past can have a power over us that it doesn’t warrant and hasn’t earned. We are often pulled towards over-analysing what has gone before but if we do that we make ourselves feel worse in the present and likely make the future seem a scarier place. My outlook on life now is vastly different to what it was a year ago and considerably different to what it has ever been. I try to look forwards as much as possible, to take the best available course of action to make my present, my future or myself better without being beholden to past events and feelings. I owe a lot of this to having therapy, and to my therapist.

In fact, I would recommend therapy to everybody. To really think about your outlook on life, to analyse who you is can be a really liberating and enlightening experience.

Depression is such a difficult thing to deal with because it is so hard to understand. It eats at the very central tenets of your being and takes over your personality. It drains you of energy and ambition and fun and love and leaves you feeling like an empty vessel. It is often said that we should treat mental ill health in the manner we treat physical ill health – a broken leg or a torn ligament. This, in my humble opinion, is bullshit. They are very separate things. It’s like saying we should treat a broken leg like we treat cancer, or we should treat diabetes in the same way we treat tooth decay. Of course there are universals like funding, training relevant medical professionals and the fact that all healthcare should be a universal right (cough Guernsey cough), but putting a cast on a brain tumour probably isn’t productive. Mental health illnesses present vastly different problems than do physical injuries or diseases and to say that we should treat these things the same is a criminal oversimplification. We need to treat mental ill health with compassion and understanding – two commodities currently very scarce. We need to treat mental ill health on its merit, not how we treat something else.

I understand the sentiment that we should view mental illnesses as just as important as physical illnesses, and I’m in complete agreement with that. But we shouldn’t treat depression like a broken leg because they are different things – we should treat depression like depression; the cruel, debilitating, confusing, vindictive, mess of an illness it is.

Thankfully it feels like I’m coming out the other side of my experience of depression and anxiety. There is a cliche along the lines of

I wouldn’t change the bad experience I’ve been through because I’ve learned from it. 

While I would never say I wouldn’t change my experience of mental illness – quite frankly I’d kick it in the dick and have never experienced it if I could – I have learned a lot about who I am, who I want to be, what I love and what I hate and everything in between.

I hope this piece comes across as generally positive. It is hard to find the positives from two and a half years of quite crippling depression but I am doing all I can to do just that. I’m trying to focus on the future. I’m moving back to the Sheffield area in November and it will be a fresh start for me and I’m excited to see what the future has in store.

My parting thought will be this: the future can seem dark and opaque but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We tend to think of the unknown as scary and we treat it with trepidation. What I’ve been trying to do, and what I think has been really helpful to me over the past few months, is to embrace the future, to embrace the unknown as the almost infinite web of possibilities it presents. I don’t know where I see myself in a year, in five years, in ten years or in fifty years and I think that’s great – how boring life would be if we knew what was going to happen. The past is full of enough darkness, enough difficulty for me. I’m determined that the future won’t be.

 

It’s taken a lot of willpower to open up a tab to write this. It’s taken a lot of mental battling to even contemplate writing anything, but I know that I want to write.

But what to write about? Donald Trump becoming president elect of the most powerful country in the world, despite being Donald Trump? Brexit? Jurgen Klopp’s high pressure tactics and how they contrast with Pep Guardiola’s more considered, possession based approach? All of these things would, under normal circumstances, interest, irritate, impassion, anger, confuse, delight and dumbfound me. But at the moment they do… nothing. So, back to the question. What to write about?

The only thing I can think to write about (and this has probably been spoiled by the title) – the only thing I really experience – is my depression.

Almost ten months ago, I woke up on a Monday morning and I couldn’t do it anymore.

There’s not much more that I remember from that day, that week, maybe even that month. I couldn’t tell you what I did on the Monday other than cry. Not normal tears, not tears I had ever cried before. It felt like every tear was worse than the last and it was uncontrollable. My mum sat at the end of my bed for ages with me, or whatever bit of me was still there. It felt like I had cried forever and that forever hadn’t even started yet. I didn’t think it would stop. I didn’t think it could stop.

It did stop though. It stopped and it felt like there was nothing of me left, no thoughts, no feelings, no joy, no appetite, no wants and no needs. I didn’t really exist. I was a shell. For the next few weeks I completely shut myself off. I did everything alone. That sounds like a lot to do alone but in reality it wasn’t much. I ate alone, slept alone, pissed alone and shit alone. It was probably a week before I showered (which I also did alone). I turned off all notifications on my phone and ignored everything. Nothing existed to me at that point, nothing mattered.

A couple of days later I had a doctor’s appointment which my mum booked for me and took me to. I went and talked about what had happened – it’s pretty obvious that I had depression, I was prescribed some medication and to date I’ve had six different types. Some have worked better than others and some have had worse side effects than others. One medication gave me horrible, vivid nightmares. I was ravaged by lions, I was beaten, I was murdered and I was raped. Needless to say I didn’t sleep very much. The medication I’m on at the moment has kept me stable, but it has also meant that I’ve put on a lot of weight. I can eat a huge breakfast and feel like I’m literally starving at 10:30am. I can’t not eat because I feel physically sick, sometimes to the point that I sweat and have to run to get food. It’s like the polar opposite of having to run for a shit. In the ten months since I was diagnosed I’ve  gone up one, maybe two shirt sizes and have lost a lot of self-confidence. These side effects aren’t from tablets that make me feel good. They just stop me from falling into a really dark place.

Time to backtrack a little. I’ve explained what happened on that Monday but I haven’t gone into how I was before that.

I finished university in the summer of 2015 and I can honestly say it was the best experience of my life at that point. I had a group of friends who I loved and still love, I was learning about something I’m incredibly passionate about from people who inspired me and everything was great. It’s a horrible cliché and I hate horrible clichés but it’s true, all good things do come to an end. By June I had completely run out of money, to the point that I couldn’t buy toilet roll without asking my parents to help me out. Because of this I abandoned my hopes of staying to live in Brighton and came home to Guernsey, I moved back in with my parents and slotted nicely back into life here. I started playing football again, going to the pub with my friends in Guernsey and going on nights out. I got a job and everything seemed to be good. Who needs Brighton anyway?

Things weren’t good though, I gradually started to enjoy things less, the tedium and repetitiveness of 9-5 work in a job I didn’t like or see the value of gradually dragged me down. I spent money recklessly on anything that might cheer me up; food, drink, clothes, video games, DVDs. You name it, I bought it. I spent almost £1000 pounds on virtual currency for FIFA 16 and 17 because in the moment that I spent it I got a rush, wondering if anything exciting would come of it. It never did, but I still thought it might. I was addicted.

I got to the point of hating work so much that I hoped I would be hit by a car on my way in so I didn’t have to go. I called in sick when I wasn’t sick. I just needed to stop, to do nothing. At this point I didn’t like anything, I’d go out drinking and get wasted and feel awful in the morning, partly because I was hungover and partly because I’d spent £100 and got nothing in return apart from a banging headache and some sick in the toilet. Life was shit, really, really shit.

I didn’t quite hit the point of suicide, who knows how close I was. I wanted to get hit by a car after all. But I didn’t get to suicide, I got to that Monday. That Monday when everything smacked me in the face and I couldn’t do it anymore.

It was a number of months before I lost my job.  I hated it anyway and even if I did get better I wouldn’t have gone back, but it still hurt. Depression makes you feel worthless at the best of times, losing a job I hated and didn’t want just amplified that.

After a while I told friends I had depression and that was why I wasn’t at work and wasn’t responding to their messages. Not one person questioned me, asked me why I was depressed, what did I have to be depressed about. It was genuinely amazing to be that supported, everybody sympathised and said they would do anything to help and understood that me getting better would take time. At the time it didn’t feel like that though, I don’t know what I wanted from people but I didn’t get it and it sounds so selfish to say it now but I felt abandoned and alone despite everybody around me being amazing human beings. I wanted more, but I don’t know what of.

Around this time I met my girlfriend. Possibly the best thing to happen to me came at one of the lowest points in my life. I was terrified that she wouldn’t like me, that depression would scare her away. Our first date was spent watching films at my house. So was the second. I couldn’t bear the thought of going out and I hated that we couldn’t do ‘normal’ date stuff.

I told her I was depressed pretty quickly, it was petrifying but I did it and she was amazing about it. We’ve been together for 8 months and I love her more every day for how much she supports me, despite being extremely busy.

I’ve also started football coaching this season. It’s mentally draining and, if I was being honest, I couldn’t tell you that I enjoy it. I sort of know it’s a good thing to do, to not close myself off but a lot of the time I would prefer to close myself off. I don’t enjoy it, I just do it and afterwards I often feel worse than I did beforehand. I have no evidence that it is a good thing to do really. People tell me it is though. My doctor and psychologist say I need to keep doing things like it to get better but it doesn’t really make me feel better. Maybe it stops me from getting worse.

This is how I think a lot of the time; ifs, buts, maybes. I don’t have any conviction and I imagine it comes from a lack of real emotion. Some days I feel better than others. Some days I feel awful. Happiness is fleeting, I get brief flashes but my brain can quickly come up with a reason that the feeling of happiness is stupid and I feel bad again. Feeling bad doesn’t mean I’m sad, in a way sad would be good. Most of the time I don’t know what I feel, I don’t really feel anything at all and it’s disorienting. I don’t really get gratification from anything so I don’t know what to do with myself and I never really know what I want to do.

I still don’t work. I’m on what in Guernsey is called ‘invalidity benefit’. I’m an invalid. As you can imagine, that’s a wonderful thing to be labelled by your government when you already don’t really value yourself. The thought of working still feels unbearable, if I had to get up tomorrow morning and go to work I honestly feel like I would have a breakdown like the Monday morning I keep going on and on about (sorry) and I’d be right back at square one. That’s ten months later, on medication with a few useless counselling sessions and some CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) behind me.

For ten months my life has been on pause. I don’t have a career, trying to think about what I want to do for the rest of my life is paralysing. I worked for about six months and fell into depression, how on earth am I going to cope with another 40 years? It’s scary and at the moment I have no belief that I can do it. I couldn’t do a day.

So, that’s what I decided to write about. Life with depression. Writing is one of the things I’ve loved to do and I haven’t done it in close to a year because of my mental health, but doing this felt like a small victory.

Mental health has a huge stigma surrounding it still, especially in men. We’re brought up to deal with everything like a man, not to be emotional and concentrate on real stuff like changing lightbulbs and cars and football.

I didn’t deal with my declining mood when it first started to appear not only for this reason but also because I thought it was normal. I thought it was normal that I didn’t enjoy going to the pub, I thought it was normal to spend stupid amounts of money on pretty much nothing. By January and February of this year I thought it was normal to want to get hit by a car on the way to work.

We need to talk about these things and pay close attention to each other. Depressed people are very good at not appearing depressed and, as I mentioned above, at convincing themselves that their thinking processes are normal. Hopefully in writing this I might help somebody recognise these thoughts in themselves or in others and encourage them to get help quickly. I’m still trying to beat depression but it’s tough and a lot of the time it feels like I’m losing but without the support I’ve had I might have lost. So please, if you have any of these feelings don’t suffer in silence. Talk about it and get help. Having mental health problems doesn’t make you weak or a coward or stupid.

Thank you for reading this mess, it means a hell of a lot to me.